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Egglike (game genre)
Origin of the term and of the first egglike game Although most people claim that The Fantastic Game was the pioneer game of the genre, it was actually LSD: Dream Emulator, a single-player game that was created back in October 22nd, 1998 by the development studio Asmik Ace Entertainment, originally playable only through Sony's first console, PlayStation. The Fantastic Game, on the other hand, was made by a single developer, Fantasticaneer, in 2012, and it is very different from LSD: Dream Emulator, but shares a similarity in regards of concept. The reason most people say Fantasticaneer's game resulted in the origin of the genre is that the YouTuber/streamer Vinny from the Vinesauce community has recorded a gameplay of the game shortly after its release and, during the stream, he called the game an "egglike" due to the content of the game, taking as reference the famous big white eggs that exist in the game. Because of this, we can't say that the genre "egglike" is official. LSD: Dream Emulator was made in a time where practically every game was either a shooting game, an adventure game, or a fighting game, and all of which had elements based on reality. However, LSD: Dream Emulator was extremely surrealistic, ending up being a huge and really unexpected surprise for the gaming community. Even though it became very popular, people didn't seem to be interested in making a series of games based on the PlayStation Classic, which ended up being classified as an adventure game, since it primarily involves exploration Wait, so egglikes were originally supposed to be adventure games? Yes. The 2012 game was the first one to be considered an egglike by how it looks like, but in terms of gameplay, it is an adventure game. However, Shadow of Shrek and Scaregame.exe, for instance, are also egglike games, but they are horror games, and they came after Fantasticaneer's biggest creation. These games are classified as egglikes due to an element that all of these games share in common. There are lots of subgenres of egglikes, but now, we'll talk about what radically characterizes an egglike game. The fundamental concept of "Egglike" and other characteristics The term "egglike" refers to an unofficial genre of games. Games that fit the egglike genre are called "egglike games", or simply, "egglikes". "Egglike" defines games that possess a full bag of weirdness, more formerly speaking, that has the use of references about pop culture and memes all over the place, persuading the player to look for more references. This persuasion is even higher in the case of egglikes that inputs an in-game currency for the player (which can be golden eggs, eggs, dollaz, etc.) and adding doors or barriers that can only be opened when the player has enough or more than enough to go through. Despite the fact that these egglikes have an ending, the majority of egglikes don't have a story, giving the player the simple objective of exploring and getting collectibles to get to the end of the game. Most of the egglikes are very recognized for the clearly visible terrible graphics and level design, having basic textures and models (most of which are pre-made assets that are taken directly from the engine that was used to make these games). Usually, the terrain is also horribly designed, in which for instance, mountains and hills look like big cones made of grass, or canyons that have little to no detail at all. The most classic egglikes used to utilize a very remarkable element which isn't so popular nowadays which is the word salad. First seen in Fantasticaneer's most famous game, the word salad grammatically transforms sentences, inserting misspelled words, exaggerated and/or inaccurate use of punctuation, sometimes making every letter lowercase. Coherence and cohesion are (generally) the less affected aspects of the word salad because they can be found after a hard interpretation of the text, which also might be the reason why this element ended up dying out in the next games. Last but not least, it is good to note that practically all of the egglikes are singleplayer games, and that most of them are totally free to download, which is very fair due to their general quality. Most of these games don't have their own site, being uploaded in indie game sites (like Gamejolt, Itch.io or IndieDB) for people to download and play them. Additionally, some of the games can be downloaded as a file from MediaFire. Subgenres Although Egglike is an unofficial genre of games, it is still, a genre of games. That also means that it has subgenres that are also unofficial. Check them out: Walking Simulator This is possibly the most common subgenre of egglike. As the name suggests, walking simulators are egglike games in which the player needs to walk most of the time. In these games, you can sprint, but the character don't run as fast as a normal human would run, making it totally useless depending on the game. The worst part about walking simulators is that they can bore very quickly due to how much he player needs to walk to get to a certain point and that boredom is increased audibly as well. Places that play no song or places that play the same music over and over again turns the game incredibly tiring, even if you still have places to explore. Collect-a-thon At first sight, collect-a-thons are actually pretty similar to walking simulators. However, instead of just walking around, the game gives you an extra challenge: get collectibles. In games that fit into this subgenre, you're sometimes limited to explore the game, because there are some areas that are locked and that can only be accessed after you acquire a certain amount of collectibles, making them some sort of an in-game currency. Additionally, most of these games have more collectibles than the player needs to collect in order to finish the game, which is a good thing, since it only motivates exploration. For instance, if we add up all of the dollaz required to finish The Fantastic Game, we'll get a total of 15 dollaz. However, if we consider the only 2-dolla bill in the game (located in the purple tunnel), we'll find out that the game actually has 16 dollaz in total. Spread and popularity of the genre Even though the first game to be considered an Egglike was made in 1998, its games and even the term itself didn't even get close to being recognized worldwide. According to Google Trends, the word "egglike" has been noticeably searched only in Canada and in the United States, with the first results appearing in October of 2012. It seems that it was intensely searched (100%) from August 2nd to 8th of 2015, getting its search record as of now.